I traveled to Tokyo when I was researching this book, along with my podcast producer, Jacob Smith. And right after we landed, Jacob and I got in a cab and went to visit a museum called the Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage. It’s a memorial to the events that I’m going to describe in the next few chapters—the outcome of the struggle between the Bomber Mafia and Curtis LeMay.
I go to war museums all the time, such as the Imperial War Museums in London. The one on Lambeth Road is in a big grand building, but there are also two other branches in London and two more around the country. You can spend a few weeks going through them. And memorials. I’ve been to many of those, too: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, on the Mall in Washington, DC; Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem. Each is powerful, moving, designed by a world-famous architect. Each has a presence.
So when Jacob and I got in our taxi in Tokyo, I assumed that we would be going toward the area where the museums are—the center of town, near the Imperial Palace. But we didn’t. We went in the opposite direction, away from the business districts and tourists. We went east, down a very plain commercial street, over a big bridge. Farther and farther. Then we took a left-hand turn down a side street, and the driver stopped. And I wondered—was there some misunderstanding? I’d written down the address on a piece of paper. Did I write it down wrong? I showed the address to the driver. He nodded and pointed. And sure enough, when I squinted, I could see the sign for the museum. We were in front of what looked like a medical office building. It was three stories tall, built of brick.
We walked in and saw a little gift shop to the side—actually, just a couple of bookshelves. Next to that was what looked like a classroom, with a bunch of folding chairs, where an introductory video was playing. Then we went through a tiny courtyard and up the stairs to the main exhibition. The floors were linoleum. There were lots of black-and-white photos on the walls. A scale model of a B-29—the kind you’d buy in a toy store—hung from the ceiling. Jacob took a picture of me in front of the museum after we were finished. I have it on my phone. It looks like I’m coming from a dentist’s appointment.
We’re all familiar with the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945: Little Boy and Fat Man, dropped from the Enola Gay. There are grand monuments and memorials to those events. There are rows upon rows of history books that cover the topic. Debates continue to this day. I was in the midst of finishing this book when the seventy-fifth anniversary of those attacks was observed; on that day you had a hundred chances to relive the memory.
But the Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage is not about what happened after the nuclear attacks on Japan. It’s about what happened before them—between November of 1944 and the late winter of 1945. From the command of Haywood Hansell to that of Curtis LeMay. A little bit of history that has been relegated to a side street.
Why is it on a side street? In some sense that’s the subtext of the second half of this book. Something happened when the Bomber Mafia and Curtis LeMay moved their focus to the other side of the world, from England and Europe to the Mariana Islands, in the middle of the Pacific, something that everyone involved found inconvenient. Or unbearable. Or unspeakable. Or maybe all three.
This is not a war story but rather a story set in war, because sometimes our normal mechanisms of commemoration fail us. And what comes next is an attempt to figure out why.
Chapter Six
“It would be suicide, boys, suicide.”
1.
All war is absurd. For thousands of years, human beings have chosen to settle their differences by obliterating one another. And when we are not obliterating one another, we spend an enormous amount of time and attention coming up with better ways to obliterate one another the next time around. It’s all a little strange, if you think about it.
Nonetheless, even within that general category of absurd, there is a continuum. The war that was fought in Europe at least resembled previous wars. It was absurd in a familiar way: neighbor against neighbor. The D-day landing required a short trip across the English Channel. People can swim the English Channel. On the ground, troops marched, holding rifles. They fired big pieces of artillery. Give Napoleon one week of training, and he probably could have managed the Allied push across Europe as well as any general from the twentieth century.
But the Pacific theater? It was on the other end of the war-absurdity continuum.
The United States and Japan probably had less contact with each other and knew less about each other than any two wartime combatants in history. More importantly, they were as far apart geographically as any two combatants in history. The Pacific war was, by definition, a sea war—and, as the conflict grew more intense, an air war. But the sheer scale of the Pacific battleground made it the kind of air war that no one had fought before.